


The Lives We Lead

by crimsonThalposis



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:07:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27744949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimsonThalposis/pseuds/crimsonThalposis
Summary: As New L'Manberg rises from its own shell-shocked ruins, the people left behind there must seek their own methods of recovery. An orphan speaks to his father, and that's not even the strangest part.
Relationships: Floris | Fundy & Wilbur Soot, No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 45





	The Lives We Lead

_The second worst thing about your dad being dead is the way he forgets your name._

With the kind of ingrained clumsiness that he had come to expect from melancholy and sleep deprivation, Fundy toppled out of bed for the third time in a row and lay facedown in glum acceptance. Some speck of discipline leftover from Schlatt's regime must have lingered, lodged in the cracks amid his old ideals like so much wet coal dust; he could not rest whilst the sun was in the sky. That meant there was more work to do. So Fundy shrugged on his coat and balanced his hat over his ears and went to brave the outside world.

Sorrow did not now, as it had in the adrenaline-soaked depths of war, sharpen the world around him. The sense of loss and anticlimax that hovered around each corner in a tactless cloud did not guide Fundy as wrath had then. Colours and scents felt blunted, unimportant. Tiring. Grampa had been right; he really did need to start getting out more now that there was no more danger. _And no more moping either_ , Fundy resolved as he kicked a spent firework shell out of his path and very resolutely did not think about it. _Not for_ _me._

He had options. Slow, meandering, he hiked his way uphill through New L'Manberg and waved to everyone he saw. The distant twin smells of sea salt and cooling bread were funneled into the new town square, a welcome balm to the nose where there had been only ash and gunpowder for days. Fundy stopped, sniffed the air hungrily, felt seething embarrassment for a short moment when Thunder chuckled from his balcony across the way. But nothing else happened. No reprimand, no harsh snarl.

There was no longer a tacit punishment for the transgression of being content, and Fundy took happy advantage of this fact as he strolled through the third iteration of his birthplace. It was vindicating to see it become a place of bustling industry again, albeit slowly. Not in the Schlatt way, all sharp angles and looming towers, but in a warm communal sense that invoked Tubbo's hand in the new plans. It had been rather a long time, Fundy reflected, since he had thought to critique anything so banal as his nation's aesthetic. There was a comfort in that mundanity. They had a water mill, for Prime's sake.

Despite the heavy-set gloom that hung over him in the aftermath of everything, he didn't have to force the grin to nobody that accompanied his climb over the ridge. It was the unnatural incline of turf forced upwards and uprooted. Someone, Quackity had said off-handedly at their last Cabinet meeting, could stand to check on the new podium and to affix support beams to its corners. Nobody had volunteered. Tubbo had a meeting, and nobody else was willing to spend more time than they had to over Old L'Manberg. And so here Fundy was. It was slow, muddy, lonely work, and he threw his whole weight into it with unnecessary vigour and very little thought.

"Good evening, Foreman," a familiar stilted voice called out from far too close, and between one blink and the next Wilbur was sitting on the low wooden wall. Sitting wasn't even the right word, Fundy self-corrected irritably. He was perched slightly above it, legs slung over each other rakishly. The picture of youthful curiosity, he shrugged subtly and smiled widely and looked generally perversely younger than the fox kneeling on the decking. A bad day, then.

Fundy glared at him for an excruciating second. The innocent ghost of his guilty father looked back, placid, slightly puzzled. "Are you alright?" he asked. Fundy grunted noncommittally in the loosest definition of response, hoping Wilbur would fuck off of his own accord.

He did not.

He just watched the build take shape over the afternoon, dull grey eyes alive not with jealous madness - not any more - but with simple interest. Condescension, that glittering mainstay that had always haunted even their happiest shared memories, did not appear in those eyes no matter how many tools he dropped or boards he successfully secured. It was a flat and self-evident observation, sans judgment, and although that was a dream come true it was also in the moment profoundly unsettling.

In all fairness, Wilbur was hard to look at. Not just because of the things he'd done, either - his edges blended faintly with the skyline like the dripping of watercolours, and he drifted around in a distinctly non-euclidean fashion that hurt Fundy's eyes and sent unease skittering all the way to the tips of his ears. No ghoulish transparency, no spectral glow accompanied these small prosaic horrors. He was just Wilbur, greyed out. That was the whole problem.

"Sunset's nice today," Fundy said after an uncomfortable interim of what was, if he turned from his labour, completely unbroken eye contact. (It was, although he hardly cared to notice. The sun teetered wine-drunk and heaving on the horizon, a solemn floodlight that streaked the newly-varnished stage with burnished amber.) At this proclamation Wilbur nodded so enthusiastically that it looked as though his floppy hair might fly off into the yawning crater below. In death it was combed and clean and well-behaved, a long fluffy halo that bore too close a similarity to Fundy's own hair for comfort. Wilbur seemed to be having the same thought as Fundy drew down his hat and began to polish the scuffs from his axe. They sat on the edge of the decking and looked down at the darkness quietly, a silent duo in unfortunate silhouette. The darkness looked patiently back. If Fundy didn't look up, he could barely even glimpse the fading glow of sunlight.

"This is a really silly thing to say," Wilbur piped up, "but you sort of remind me of my ex-wife. Is that, like, speciesist? I don't mean it to be." It wasn't, but reassurance was still too adjacent to kindness for Fundy to handle, so he simply pretended not to hear the words over the whistle of wind around the caverns of Old L'Manberg. It was a mournful tune. The earth, in his opinion, was not meant to be gouged so quickly and so dramatically. It wasn't fair at all.

And then the full weight of the sentence hit him, and very suddenly Fundy had a choice to make. Before the great equaliser of a just death, Wilbur had been stubbornly recalcitrant about the circumstances surrounding his birth. He knew he'd grown exponentially faster than the human boys did now and very little else. His father had forever maintained a stale ongoing joke about the salmon that sometimes made their way down L'Manberg's canal, undercut with a sharpness that demanded the conversation went no further.

Nowadays, he was neither sharp nor recalcitrant about pretty much anything. The ghost of Wilbur, Fundy knew, was yet not Wilbur himself. There was a heady, naive fascination lining every movement he made, as if he was nothing but silken ropes and pulleys in the configuration of a man - an aged and coarse wonder that had died long before its mortal bulk. Easily distracted and overly familiar and overwhelmingly _present,_ the spirit that wore his dad's face was fundamentally different to the original in some other way Fundy couldn't quite place.

He made his choice.

"Oh?" he answered, and Wilbur rose upwards in gratified shock. He was already becoming used to being ignored, something from which Fundy drew a deep and savage satisfaction.

"Yes!" It did not echo around the great pit, and his brows knitted together in momentary unsettled sadness. "I mean. Yes. She's one of the last things I remember, to be honest with you." When Fundy tried to butt in, he waved it off and yelled cheerily over a lazy mid-air somersault, "I really don't want to know. Please." Right. He swallowed down his mounting exasperation and nodded. Of course not. No version of Wilbur would want to bring up the uncomfortable past. The ghost watched his tail begin to sway, curiosity weeping out onto his perfectly blank expression, and sunk to lounge again on the wall.

"Could you..." Fundy thought about walls and streams and trees and hills and black and yellow and the last words he had exchanged with Wilbur Soot. "Could you tell me about her?" And the guilt that stabbed at his gut and flattened his ears was slightly, so slightly assuaged by the sheer joy on what were almost Wilbur's features.

It was a hard thing, mourning someone who, with concrete proof and firsthand testimony, was happier to be dead. Grief was not constructed on a two-way street. _By far the worst thing about your dad being dead_ , Fundy figured inwardly, _is the way he wants to be your friend._

"She was very good at animals," Wilbur started in that raspy halting tone, deep in thought insofar as he could even think about the far past. He floated absently upright and then upside-down again, humming. Fundy felt the sudden absurd urge to reach out and tap his nose. It was not the only reversal of roles they had suffered. "Mammals, usually, but when we first met she decided it would be funny to pretend to be a..." he trailed off and sighed. Then he snickered without malice, which was jarring to hear. "Prime, you'll never believe it."

"A salmon?" whispered Fundy with immediacy, throat hoarse and lips pulled involuntarily back over his teeth, and yet Wilbur shot him a look ten times more admiring and deferential than any he had in life. It hurt like hell going in and came out worse, a blade tempered sentimental.

"How did you guess? Clever boy," he added, and Fundy about short-circuited. "Yes-Her name was Sally, but we had this little bit, me and her, that it was short for...you know." And Fundy did know. Sally the Salmon. A straightforward joke. A stubborn joke, undercut for years on end with a sharpness that demanded the conversation went no further. Laid bare in an instant, because a pocket of beyond in a yellow jumper had decided it would improve a stranger's day. They laughed like old times. Wilbur's high giggle rang out a moment too long. He felt his jaw snap shut painfully and retreated back to the task at hand. His father made no effort to interrupt, floating ever further out into the abyss in the throes of some daydream of better days. No wonder people fucking ignored him.

So his mother had been not a fox hybrid, but a shapeshifter. This single word did not in and of itself inspire in Fundy any great epiphany. The sun did not slow in its bloody descent, the abyss beneath his dangling paws did not sew itself obligingly together and leave the land unscathed. Nothing in the moment changed about the world, but it was suddenly something that made a modicum more sense. And that was all, that was everything that Fundy Soot had ever wanted.

Part of him was still angry that it had taken so very long.

"She was the most beautiful woman in the world, you know," Wilbur said from directly above him. Fundy almost fell off the podium, scrambling back from the edge. "When I said that, she would laugh and change her face to the ones she said she wanted, and I would always know. I don't...I don't remember what happened after that. I said, I, I said ex-wife, didn't I? I did."

He had that faraway, translucent look in his eyes that encroached when he tried to recall unhappy things. And if nothing else that was the bluntest affirmation, a chilling confirmation of Fundy's worst fears. That he was unwanted. That the hassle of raising him was too much for even this genocidal excuse for a father who had once held the world in his hands. "I made some bad choices, Mister Foreman. Don't do what I did," and Fundy was turning already to leave with contempt thrashing in his veins, "or you'll leave a child behind."

He wheeled around, fluffed up in abrupt shock until his jacket rode up. Wilbur cocked his head at the sight and curled his lip slowly, as if the motions of sympathy and confusion were still new to him. They probably were. "Are you sure you're quite alright, Mister Foreman?" he said with real concern, pressing a whole golden apple into his paws and closing them around it with cool fingertips.

And Fundy looked away and said yes, yes, he was, and thank you, and goodnight, and thank you, and goodbye now, and thank you.


End file.
